Venue: St Peter's Catholic School
Address: St Peter's Catholic Comprehensive School, St Catherine's Road, Bournemouth, Dorset, BH6 4AH
Town: Bournemouth, GB

St Peter's Catholic School is a co-educational Roman Catholic school located in Bournemouth, Dorset, England. It is run under the joint trusteeship of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portsmouth and a religious order of teachers, the De La Salle Brothers. Former headteacher David Todd joined the school in 2013 and converted the school into an academy. The current headteacher is Mr Ben Doyle. St Peter's has achieved both drama and sports specialist school status. The nearest Catholic church is Our Lady Queen of Peace and Blessed Margaret Pole. The Lower Primary School (Years reception -6) is on Holdenhurst Avenue, Iford; the Upper School (Years 7-13) is on St. Catherine's Road, Southbourne. The Upper School site includes the De La Salle Theatre, which seats 470 people. St Peters was founded as a private boys' boarding school in Southbourne, Bournemouth on 29 September 1936 with 34 boys by the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) as an independent boys' school, on the site of a former Girls school, Grassendale, thereafter, to be called ‘St Mary’s Gate’. The founding headmaster was Father Bellanti, former Headmaster at Stoneyhurst College, and the school was run by the Jesuits. The last Jesuit community consisted of nine fathers and two brothers. One of the Jesuit priests who was a housemaster at St Peter's was Father Gerard Hughes S.J., the author of God of Surprise in which he observed St Peter's boys were "affable and undemanding". After the Second World War, in the summer of 1947, the school was handed over to the De La Salle brothers and they began a long period of development for St Peter’s as a private day and boarding school for boys in the English public school tradition. At the time of transition there were 145 boys in the school. The Catholic De La Salle brothers supported the ethos and ideals of Saint Jean-Baptiste de La Salle, the patron saint of teachers, and the founder of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. From the time of the first De La Salle